Saturday, August 22, 2015

"Tobacco giant defeats suit brought by family of Bay of Pigs veteran" but not Austin

My friend, Austin Carr, who is a "plaintiff's lawyer," recently tried a products liability case against a tobacco company in Circuit Court here in Miami-Dade County, representing the family of a husband and father who died of emphysema. On August 18, the Miami Herald had an excellent article by Carol Rosenberg on the trial. I have reproduced all of the article below, because I am afraid that the Herald at some point will kill the link, and I want to keep the article. It is so well written: tight, deeply informative, and fair. And Austin comes off as he is, a fine lawyer who keeps to the facts, and has the courage to take a case that many would decline because of its difficulty and uncertainty.

A Miami jury sided with R.J. Reynolds Tuesday against the family of a
former Bay of Pigs prisoner who smoked for five decades then died of
emphysema at age 87.

The jury of six ruled the tobacco giant was
not responsible for the October 2005 death of Renato Santos, who had
quit cigarettes when he was diagnosed with emphysema in 1990. The
product liability case, first filed by the Santos family on Jan. 9,
2008, had sought $16 million.

Santos started smoking as a teen in
Cuba and became a pack-and-a half a day Pall Mall smoker, said the
family’s lawyer Austin Carr. “The jury found that he was not addicted, I
believe, principally because he never attempted to quit until he was
diagnosed,” the lawyer said.

The suit was the latest in a series
seeking damages following a 2006 Florida Supreme Court decision, Engle
v. Liggett Group, which threw out a $145 billion class-action verdict
against cigarette makers and set the stage for individuals to sue.

Carr
described the smoker as a Bay of Pigs veteran who left Cuba months
before the ill-fated April 1961 invasion, trained in Central America and
then invaded his island. He was held prisoner until the United States
exchanged food and medicine for the men in December 1962. In Miami, he
had 10 children, Carr said, and worked as a carpenter on yacht
interiors.

At the trial, which started last week, the family
stipulated that Santos was partly at fault. In July, Circuit Court Judge
Peter Lopez ruled for the tobacco company that Santos was to some
degree responsible “less than 100 percent ... for causing his
smoking-related injuries.” Carr said Tuesday that his side argued “it
takes a smoker and a cigarette maker, and we believe that R.J. Reynolds
should have had some percentage of fault in the case. They made the
dangerous product that they asked their customers to smoke.”

Rebeca
Santos, the dead smoker’s daughter, brought the case on behalf of her
84-year-old mother, whom Carr said does not speak English but attended
the trial.

He argued that Santos became a smoker at a time when it
was common. “Doctors smoked. Nurses smoked. Patients smoked in the
hospital,” he told the jury. “It was a completely different culture back
in those days.”

Austin has several more of these kinds of cases lined up for trial over the next six months. Don't sleep so soundly, Big Tobacco.